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Beginner's Guide
Introduction Your village will start out with a small piece of fertile land and you could transform it to become a flourishing city with hundreds of citizens and many interesting buildings. You can create many unique buildings and units or research one of the fascinating technologies. With enough time and resources, your city will become the heart of an empire. Resources As you play the game you will encounter a number of resources. These resources are needed to advance your civilization. There are five resources: :*Wood :*Marble :*Crystal Glass :*Wine :*Sulphur Wood is your standard resource - it is used for making and upgrading buildings, creating ships, and building units. The other four are luxury resources, which are used at advanced levels of buildings and units. You will notice that on your island there will be only one luxury resource facility. You must trade with or pillage other players, who have access to different islands, to acquire the other luxury resources. When your city becomes an empire through colonization, you'll be able to colonize different islands to gain personal access to the other luxury resources. Buildings Buildings play a major role in the growth of your towns. They can build units and ships, house scientists, or entertain your citizens. The first four buildings you encounter are: Town Hall, Academy, Barracks, and Trading Port. :* Your town hall is your main structure - it shows how happy/sad your people are, your housing capacity (which you increase by upgrading the town hall), your income/costs, and the distribution of citizens, workers, and scientists. It also allows you to change your town name. :* The Academy houses scientists who work on discovering new technologies for your empire. :* The Barracks allows you to create units for both defending your towns and attacking others. :* The Trading Port gives you the ability to build your own fleet of Cargo Ships, which are vital for trade, raiding, and colonization. Technologies Technology research is the main way to advance your civilization. There are four main streams of technology: Military, Economy, Science, and Seafaring. Set on one and the program will start you researching the next in line if possible, when one technology is discovered, without stopping. Well Digging should be one of your first researches. It grants you a morale bonus and a bonus to your population cap, very important to a beginning town. Conservation is also an important first research as it grants you access to a warehouse, which will protect some of your resources from being pillaged when someone decides to pillage you. When you get access to grapes and wine, Wine Press will grant you access to a tavern, which can tremendously boost your town's morale, providing more people to work. Don't bother researching Paper for its own sake; it's a trap! Although that 2% extra research per hour is tasty, it is only useful once you have a level four or five academy. Beginner's Steps Now that we have the basics, let's put this all together. The following are the recommended first steps. Don't forget to review the Ikariam User Interface section if you need to get familiar with what you're seeing. # Rename your town via the town hall. # Build an academy. (When you reach a high levelled city it will look best at either of the furthest sides) # Set wood production to 30 by clicking 'Show Island' and then clicking on the pile of wood (or click your Town Hall, which will show the status of your citizens in your town, click the icon on the other side of the bar to the workers). Something to remember about Ikariam is that resources are produced in real time (i.e. if you are making 30 wood an hour, you will get an additional unit of wood every 2 minutes). # Once the academy is completed, set the number of researchers to 8. Notice that your income may now be in the negative, that is because you do not have enough citizens that produce general wealth, i.e. gold. This is not a problem, since you start out with lots of gold. Gradually, as your town size increases and you get more citizens, you will once again be profitable. Do not be afraid of spending gold in the beginning. # In the academy, change your research over to Science. By doing this you will be able to gain the benefits of Well Digging early on, which is +50 population max and +50 happiness. This is ideal since you can then change back to Economy research path and let the game glide you through Conservation, Pulley, and Wealth, while having the added population. # Build the barracks and the Trading Port (but keep the Trading Port at low levels, see Pillaging for the reason why). You'll also want to build an expansion for your town hall as soon as possible afterwards to account for future growth of your populace. (Barracks will eventually look best directly above Town Center). Definitely get a ship early on, as it will prove crucial. # At about 4 hours, you will finish researching Well Digging (or if you had an Academy at level 3 with full scientists you can finish it in 1 hour), and you should notice that your birth rate will jump by one person (e.g. from 2.85 people an hour to 3.85 an hour). Now change your research back to Economy. # If your Saw Mill isn't at level 2 by hour 5 on your island, you should donate to get it there. Hopefully most people on the island have donated a little bit, but if you can muster the resources to finish off the 350, then the 10 extra lumber is probably worth it in the long run. # Research through Wine Press, while upgrading your academy and town hall as much as you can. # Build a wall, because niggers always try to steal your shit. If you start getting attacked repeatedly, put rat-poison in your chickenz and watermelonz, and they will stop. In order to build a Warehouse you will need to have researched Conservation. The rest is up to you. Remember to check the Towns report for happenings and the Diplomacy report for messages. What Things Should Be Worth People can, and should, sell what they have for whatever the market will bear. However, the ACTUAL value in gold of any given resource can be seen on the list below. *Wood 4 gold (4 value from not having citizen earn 4 gold per hour) *Luxury Goods 8 gold (4 cost from not having citizen earn 4 gold per hour, plus you only earn ½ a luxury unit per citizen you apply towards luxury resource gathering) *Research 12 gold (4 cost from not having citizen earn 4 gold per hour, plus an additional 8 cost for the actual research) These do not take into account the relatively fixed and/or shared costs of the Wood Mill, Luxury Good, Town Hall or Academy expansions needed to bring in more people or resources. Working Strategies Should you find yourself under attack, demolish your Trading Port back to nothing. Your attackers can only take resources through your trading port so demolishing it before they arrive limits how much they can steal from you. If you are going to be away for a while and have few to no defenses, it is probably best to demolish your port before leaving for the same reason. It costs very little to rebuild and only moments to demolish. Island Strategies by Luxury Good *Crystal Mine - Research is your greatest strength. Try to get your Academy up to 6 ASAP. Most people will want to trade for crystals so offer them 1:1 for resources you need, like marble or sulphur. Sulphur tends to be harder to get. *Vineyard - Your greatest strength will be population growth, when you can research Wine Press and build a Tavern. Until then it is only a trade good to other towns that already have taverns. *Quarry - You can upgrade all of your building far more quickly than individuals with other resources, except the Academy. Make friends with someone on an island with a Crystal Mine and offer to trade for your marble. *Sulphur Pit - This luxury resource allows you to follow the path of war more than any other. You can produce more Units than anyone else, so Pillaging will be what you are most likely to gain from, unless you feel like trading your sulphur for the resources of others (which is usually a far wiser option when starting out because everyone else is likely bigger than you). See also *Actions *Buildings *Ikariam User Interface *Loot *Pillaging *Research *Ships *Trading *Units *The Tech Tree Category:Guides Related sites *Game Servers - play on a server near you. [[http://ikariamtip.com/tutorials